Researchers Accidentally Find an Alzheimer’s Treatment

Finding new ways to treat various medical ailments is often a frustrating and tedious process for researchers. Many times, these newly created medications simple do not work as they were intended to work, and thus, they fall way short of all those great expectations and result in another failure and a dead end. But then there are those other times when a brand new drug that was created for that one sole purpose and it proves to go beyond all expectations.

Creating Drugs that Provide Pleasant Surprises

In fact, it will be so good that it proves to be effective even for ailments that are totally different than the original target. This appears to be the case in regards to an exciting new drug class that was originally intended for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. But it has been discovered that the same drug has shown to greatly benefit mice that are suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Affected Mice Showed Dramatic Improvements

This brand new class of drugs, which have been classified as “triple agonist” (due to their ability to work in three distinct ways), have been tested on mice who had been developed to express genes connected to Alzheimer’s. These animals had already been showing several of the symptoms linked to the disease, which includes memory that has been compromised as well as having difficulty in learning. These same mice indicated a marked improvement in brain functionality after getting a unique treatment.

This treatment “holds clear promise of being developed into a new treatment for chronic neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease,” said Professor Christian Holscher, who is the lead researcher for this study. This research has been posted in the publication, Brain Research.

According to this research, this triple-acting treatment is believed to be effective against Alzheimer’s disease as it protects nerve cells, and reduces amyloid plaques within the brain (which are connected to Alzheimer’s), and also reduces inflammation as it slows the degradation of nerve cells. Mice receiving treatment had shown incredible improvement in their learning ability and also their memory formation.

While the discovery of a possible treatment for a horrible disease such as Alzheimer’s is great news, but the fact that this medication was indeed originally intended as a treatment for type 2 diabetes is not a coincidence. The fact is that Type 2 diabetes has actually been connected to Alzheimer’s before, and these two ailment many times have gone hand-in-hand among the elderly. “Insulin desensitisation has also been observed in the Alzheimer’s disease brain,” the researchers pointed out in their press release. “The desensitisation could play a role in the development of neurodegenerative disorders as insulin is a growth factor with neuroprotective properties.”

It should be noted here that this treatment has not yet received any official approval for Alzheimer’s disease, and has just been used for the early trials for mice. Additional research will definitely be needed, and if we are lucky, we could get approval for this medication sooner rather than later.

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